


This Has All Happened Before

by RoryKurago



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human Kaiju, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-26 03:25:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13227108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: At the end of all things, Mako is beside Raleigh in an endless sea of grass. Raleigh is beside Mako.. . .This is a story about the end of humanity after a rockstar doctor opens the door. How did you think it would go?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hauntedjaeger (saellys)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/gifts).



> THIS WAS OVER AMBITIOUS AND I HAVE SUCH REGRET  
> ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS THE PART WHERE LT MAKO TAKES A KAIJU RAIDER BACK TO CAPRICA TO FIND THE ARROW OF APOLLO AND MEETS THE LITERAL SUN PERSONIFIED, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN  
> but I'm committed now  
> On a personal note, @hauntedfalcon it’s very amusing to me to have gone back through your PR/BSG notes from way back and found I’d pegged various characters more or less the same. (Others not so much, but we’ll get to that…)  
> I don’t know if it’s a compliment or a curse that @quigonejinn and @confabulatrix are, as always, strong influences, but that’s a thing.

Time is neither simultaneous nor linear. It is fractal: patterns repeating on a grander scale with each iteration, expanding to fill all of existence.

At the end of all things, Mako is beside Raleigh in an endless sea of grass. Raleigh is beside Mako. 

She skims her eyes across a horizon of grass rippling in waves and thinks—

. . .

This is a story about the end of humanity after a rockstar doctor opens the door to evil. How did you think it would go?

. . .

Stacker thought every day about how he ended up back on Galactica. Inevitably he came to the conclusion that someone, somewhere, was having a laugh. Had thought they were doing him a favour.

A diplomatic assignment to the ship that started it all, a public appearance to round out his career. Galactica would be neatly decommissioned in parallel to the cancer eating through Stacker, decommissioning him as well. Maybe he’d get another six months. A graceful and unsuspicious retirement. 

He lifts his chin to hear the rest of what the tourism official is telling him, and the tour continues. Somewhere behind them is the two-pilot Mark-I Jaeger in which he began service. Somewhere ahead is Herc Hansen and it has been too many years since they served together for Stacker to know how to tell Herc the news Stacker heard this morning.

. . .

Some time after humanity settled the planets of the new Colonies, portals opened in the seas and skies.

Eventually, scientists determined that the creatures sent to clear the path for new colonisers had sentience that could be converted to something compatible with humans’.

The kaiju learned to grow smaller monsters. Humanity learned—

Nuclear explosives destroyed the kaijus’ ability to send troops; human persistence forced a ceasefire. No more kaiju. No more portals.

Ten years of peace. (Peace with the kaiju; civil war instead.)

At the end of ten years, Scunner sits on the steps of the Caprican Forum eating a burger and watching the crowd. When he’s done, he wipes his fingers on the greasepaper and goes to make a phone call.

. . .

It wasn’t that Hermann blamed himself. It was that if Newton were human, Hermann would have throttled him.

. . .

The kaiju come in waves, blue-lit between the plates of their organic armour.

The kaiju coat the planets of the Colonies in toxic slime, one by one, and turn the coasts to dust. When the humans eventually have the opportunity to take a Raider apart, its insides are silicon and steel, but it _bleeds_ and the mucous envelope that protects it from the vacuum eats through the deck. 

. . .

In declining order, the day before the attack, Hermann answers a call in a car on the way to the spaceport and then apologises to his wife and asks the chauffeur to divert to the nearest metro station.  
Mako folds her dress uniform very carefully into a garment bag, careful not to crease the starch lines. The President is not attending but his signified representative is; her uniform must survive a Raptor flight up to Galactica to meet her when she arrives as a Evzone escort.  
Stacker empties his stomach into the toilet of his suite in the Caprican Administration Tower and declines a call from his sister.  
Herc reviews the speech cards Lieutenant Choi helped him put together, then the duty roster for the ceremony, then the speech cards again. At his feet, the MAX unit beeps inquiringly. He rises to take a walk and run the speech without cards.  
Chuck runs his hands over his Mark-VII in Galactica’s port hangar ready for the ceremony and turns to complain to the Chief about sloppy replacement of the intake grills.  
Alison does not strike an officer.  
Naomi records every scrap Tendo can tell her about Galactica for transmission to the Network.

Stacker steps off a State Starliner onto Galactica.

Chuck encounters his commanding officer squinting at index cards on E-Deck.

Herc—

. . .

Herc is not a workaholic. He is Coping. That he is Coping with a divorce years prior is not an obstacle, nor is the fact that his son carries Angela’s name instead of Herc’s because of it. 

What _are_ obstacles are the facts that, in the first, Chuck being Charles Donovan instead of Charles Hansen has them posted to the same ship, and in the second, that the implosion of the Twelve will stick them that way.

The facts are: 

Chuck has Angela’s name on his uniform. Herc has the MAX unit Chuck built in First Level Robotics at the Tauron Technological Institute in his quarters.

Chuck tells Herc, “It’s like we’re barely even family,” and almost spends the decommissioning ceremony in the brig when Herc tells him he might feel different if he acted like the rank on his collar.

It’s not that Chuck doesn’t take the shot. It’s that Herc fires one back. And Herc is many things but he is always excruciatingly, ruthlessly, fair. It’s one of the best and worst ways that Stacker rubbed off on him during the War.

. . .

Tamsin and Luna look at each other when Herc enters the CIC with red and swelling at the corner of his mouth. Neither judges it the right time to bring up compartmentalisation.

Tamsin summons over one of the media bees buzzing about turning Galactica into a three-ring circus and sends her to find a compact in the Commander’s colour.

. . .

“No arm candy today?” Stacker asks his aide as she straightens his tie and takes back his speech cards.

Vanessa smiles, but tightly. “No, Sir. He was called away for a personal emergency. Shall we?”

“Right, let’s get this dog and pony show over with.” Stacker leads the way into the hangar / convention centre.

. . .

Luna is Galactica’s CAG; she flies the lead Mark-VII Jaeger in the centrepiece fly-over of the ceremony. The Commander’s son flies at her right wing; Mako at her left.

Vanessa looks sidelong at Stacker as he presses two fingers to his chest. “Sir, are you all right?”

He inclines his head with eyes unshifting.

. . .

The kaiju take the planets not in order of size, or position, but military capacity and efficacy. Caprica is the first to fall.

. . .

Raleigh looks up from the fire a Wilderness Survival trainee is trying to start with wet tinder at the edge of a mountain clear-cut to see the skies open and the first of the kaiju bombs drop through. This expedition, he has four city-dwellers and a semi-competent returning trainee.

Light blooms a hundred kilometres away, dead centre of the town where the company office needs a vacuum and his coffee mug is sitting on his desk needing another scrub to clean out the stain of his last dose. He remembers to close his eyes in time.

When he opens them, a mushroom cloud is rising. Several hundred clicks beyond it, another. Overheard, scars rip through the clouds with the passing of a flight of kaiju light Raiders on attack vector to Caprica City, just over the curve of the planet. He doesn’t let himself think about how long it’s been since he heard that particular whine.

He turns back to the trainees. “Leave that,” he says as he strides past. The nearest nuclear bunker with enough meds to last them long enough to regroup is two days away.

“What’s that?” says the fire-setter. Shading her eyes, she is peering toward the clouds.

Her girlfriend joins her at the edge of the clear-cut. “Looks like—”

“Nuclear detonation,” Raleigh says briskly. “Get your packs, don’t forget your tools. We’re two days quick march from the nearest fallout shelter. Things are about to get very ugly.”

“Those aren’t Caprican ships,” says the fire-setter. “Are they Piconian?”

“They’re kaiju,” says her companion.

Raleigh re-assesses them both. He hadn’t been aware An Yuna was at all interested in military technology, for all that her mother is a Sergeant in the Colonial Fleet, but those Raiders had been a long way off and their configuration was… unusual. “Yuna’s right. They’re kaiju.” Over the sudden clamor, he said, “Talk and walk, people. They’re not here to play nice and we have a lot of ground to cover.”

One by one, they snatch for their light packs and fall into pace.

He has five trainees on this expedition. He will probably lose at least two of them.

. . .

This has all happened before. The scriptures don’t say this, but they do say time is cyclical. Heliochoidal. Stacker will comment on this later as he attempts to put events into order.

The kaiju come in pairs now, systematically dismantling the resistance like they’re running a macro. Raptors attempting to return to Galactica are shot into decaying orbit. Civilian ships returning to Caprica are unzipped like pulling the thread from a seam.

Herc’s never seen kaiju like these: sleeker, faster, more manoeuvrable. These new kaiju come with a new trick, too. Humanity strikes back with its high-tech, top-of-the-line, all-digital Mark-VII best. The EMP knocks them dead in the sky.

Luna is Galactica’s CAG. She flies the lead Mark-VII Jaeger. Mako is—

Mako is not at her wing, because she is not a combat pilot, she is an Evzone. Chuck is exactly where he always was.

Being who she is, Luna takes out one of the two light Raiders with her manual self-destruct. Tamsin’s scream can be heard three bulkheads away.

Herc blocks out the screeching in his head that might have been Tamsin’s rage or the severing of whatever ties he still had to his son.

Debris glitters in the black, lit by the explosion of the last Jaeger.

. . .

When Chuck is a child, Herc takes him plane-spotting off post. The best place for this is always the hills, off the beaten track. They go several times a year. Hours can pass watching those lulling, glittering shapes without Herc being aware of anything more than the shimmer of the airfield shields and the sun on his back.

. . .

It’s an early understanding of the kaiju that they don’t have to raze the worlds they desire to burn out the natives. They just have to poison the well.

Cheung sits on the lip of the Raptor’s cargo door watching the roping spiral of a mushroom cloud in the distance. His leg bleeds sluggishly. Already he can feel squelching in his boot when he moves his foot. Jin is under the Raptor patching the fuel line, cursing in the rough Canceron dialect of their district the kaiju, the Raptor, the Chief for decreeing that museum Raptors didn’t need to carry full repair kits. Cheung tunes him out. 

Beyond the cornfields, the dust cloud rolls up like a harbinger of the Lords: _prostrate yourself, humans, for you have disappointed us_.

It’s quite a tableau:

Gold field; grey sky; explosions in the distance; and at the centre, a maelstrom like the unravelling of Creation.

 _Well_ , Cheung thinks numbly. _You don’t see that every day._

. . .

Mako is—

Mako is an Evzone, not a Battlestar pilot, and her duty is to the newly-renamed Colonial One. She is aware, as before, that it carries her father. She is aware, newly, that he is President of the Twelve Colonies.

She deflects the Raider that comes for him before it even has a chance to sight her and feels her Jaeger bounce with the explosion as she passes through it.

. . .

Galactica’s best pilots and fighter craft are debris in space. The rest of her Mark-IV or better birds are in maintenance. What she does have are a number of antique-worthy Mark-I’s in her hangars fitted out to be museum pieces.

Alison blinks several times at her 2IC with the phone in her hand, processing that Lieutenant Choi is deadly serious. “But the Mark-VII’s…”

“None of them are coming back,” he says shortly, cruelly. There’s no time for sentimentality just this second. “Spin up the Old Guard.”

Alison blinks again, this time to clear the mist in her eyes, and orders her people to post.

“Sir,” she adds, catching Tendo just before he hangs up, “these birds are so old they need two pilots. Recommend the CAG gets onto playing match-maker as soon as we’re off this line.”

“Copy that, Chief. I’ll pass it along.”

. . .

In the CIC, Herc turns from Tendo to Kaori. “All we’ve got left is the old tubs. What do you think, Captain? Been a while since you were on the wing. How’d you like a refresher?”

There’s a runner en route to find Duc and get him to the Ready Room almost before the Commander finishes speaking.

…

The pilots still climbing the walls in the Ready Room are there only because they weren’t on duty roster like the cadre Luna took out. Kaori Koyamada isn’t thrilled to hear they’re dusting off the tanks, but she knows who she’s flying with.

“We’re back on, flyboy,” she says to Duc as she strides into the room, rapping his chest with the back of her knuckles.

Kaori’s been a desk-jockey since Tacit was tagged in the wing over the Ithaca Red Zone. Duc’s been calibrating sims. It’s with a sense of foreboding that they approach the Mark-Is. The new Jaegers have been stripped back and streamlined so a single pilot can handle them, but the resulting craft is decidedly lighter in the boots than the old models: the beasts on the deck before them needs two pilots. 

Front and centre is their own old rig—the real old gang gathered back together and refurbished in honour of their Commander and the Scorpia Campaign veterans aboard.

The last time they flew this dinosaur, half of their unit died.

“Hey,” says Duc.

Kaori looks to him with a line deep between her eyebrows.

“All for one?”

Jolted, Kaori rolls her eyes and sets her shoulder to _Tacit_ ’s landing gear. “Shut up. And push.”

. . .

Jin barely has time to fix the Raptor before survivors fleeing the blasts converge on the Raptor. Cheung has them draw lots, pulling pages from the flight manual for numbers.

This works until the crowd parts in search of number forty-six.

Cheung peers through the upraised hands and his eyes catch on a familiar face. “Hey,” he calls. “Are you Hermann Gottlieb?”

The man he addresses - tall, thin, bloodied, limping with a pair of broken spectacles dangling on a librarian chain - hesitates. “Yes… but this lady has number forty-seven.”

Cheung ignores that. “Doctor, would you come up here please.” He moves to step down from the Raptor.

Jin grabs Cheung’s arm. “What are you doing?” he hisses in Canceronic.

“Giving up my seat.”

Jin’s eyes go wide. His nostrils flare. “Like Hades. We told Ama. _Together_ , _man_ —!”

“We already fucked up by leaving Hu behind,” Cheung says, not half as levelly as he wants. “Take the Doc. You and Hu look after each other.”

“I’m not taking off without you.”

Cheung grabs his brother by the back of the neck. Pressing their foreheads together, he says, “I’m protecting you both the best way I can think of. Take care of each other.”

He shoves Jin away and helps Gottlieb into the Raptor.

. . .

Hermann doesn’t try to talk to the young man in the pilot’s seat. His uniform says Wei. Clutching his briefcase, Hermann sinks into his chair and tries to disappear. Newt is a kaiju. Newt was in the crowd, and then not.

Hermann was going to die, and then not. He looks again to the pilot. Two young men with the same face.

Which kaiju is this?

. . .

On Colonial One, a uniformed young woman with short, black hair and Scorpian features approaches his saviour’s twin.

“Jin, where’s…?” She doesn’t finish. The young man’s eyes are teary even as a muscle jumps in his jaw. He looks to Hermann. The young woman’s eyes pinch after a moment of recognition.

“He gave up his seat,” says Wei.

Hermann averts his eyes as she grips Wei’s arm and then his waist. They hold each other tightly.

“Come on, Doctor,” she says, breaking away. “There’s someone who should meet you.”

. . .

“ _Liebling_ ,” says Vanessa when they bring Hermann to Stacker on Colonial One. She breaks from the President’s side to embrace her husband. Hermann forgets that he is now in the presence of the President of the colonies and reaches for her.

“Mister President,” says Captain Mori, “this is—” 

Hermann scarcely hears her. Vanessa’s Virgonian silk blouse slides against his nose—her favourite blouse. (She has three now. Only that.) 

“Ma’am—”

“My husband has been returned to me, Captain. I’m not letting go until I’m satisfied he’s real and not a hysterical hallucination.”

Her voice is level but the frame of her glasses dislodged against his shoulder and her fingers at his waist are almost as tight as his are on hers.

As of an hour ago, Vanessa does not have much. What she does have are three suits, a breathing husband, and a heart-sickening longing that when Hermann had informed her that he was required to miss the Galactica Decommissioning for a “unanticipated but, he assures me, life-or-death meeting” with an estranged colleague, she had told him to blow the bastard off.

. . .

Kaori swears as something bounces off Tacit mid-swerve. Only as it rolls away does she realise that the Jaeger just collided with the powerless Mark-VII of Chuck frakking Donovan. She catches just a glimpse of the cracked visor, splintered fins, body trailing wires before it spins off into the black.

But Tacit’s still got a kaiju on her ass, and she’s responding to the helm like a pig. Duc is swearing himself blue as he tries to fend off the kaiju with defensive fire.

“Kaori! There’s a frakking nuke coming at us!”

There’s only so much space in the Drift. Chuck is shunted to the side.

She sees the warhead with Duc’s eyes. “Hong Kong,” she shouts on the open channel, “you’ve got an inbound nuke! All Jaegers, break, break, break!”

Tacit pulls up hard as the nuke barely grazes under her belly and streaks to its target.

Red blooms on Hong Kong’s wing. The universe turns white.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It LIVES. Like the Kaiju themselves, it keeps resurfacing from the deep to destroy my emotions.  
> I'm sorry it's not holiday themed, but it IS PR Hot Dads content, so I hope that suffices.  
> More to come, but I'm off to the BF's house for family dinner and that might be equally destructive, so here's what I have, and thanks for the excuse to rewatch BSG.

When the kaiju left the first time, civil war filled their wake. Sagittaron, Canceron, Aerilon, Lireon—all fell under waves of new chaos. Weakness and power vacuums invited attack.

Before it was over, Stacker adopted a war orphan. He still wanted to serve the Colonies. He told his new daughter he would be back, and returned to war. Two engagements passed before a close call put the fear of the gods back into him and forced him to reassess. He counted his dependents, weighed them against the need to serve the colonies with arms, and found the colonies lacking.

“So,” said Herc, “That’s really it.” They sat in a bar off post—small, quiet, popular enough with Fleet that their haircuts and bearings wouldn’t raise eyebrows, but neither would their identities. More importantly, it served its whiskey unwatered.

“You’re calling it quits.” Herc’s tone wasn’t judgemental, only measuring.

Stacker thought before he spoke, as if he hadn’t had this same conversation a dozen times in his head. As if he didn’t use Herc’s voice as his internal audit. “I need to be present for Mako and Jake. After all that’s happened… they need a fixed point. I need to be that for them. I can’t do that on the front.”

Herc swirled the whiskey in his glass. “Thought about what you’d do instead?”

Would do. As if it wasn’t already decided. Herc’s ring finger wasn’t yet bare, but he and Angela had been on the rocks for several months straight. He might have understood the trouble in keeping hold of both Fleet and family, Stacker imagined, but it had only made him hold tighter to the things he retained. That, however, was a different conversation—to be had away from electronic ears.

“Politics,” Stacker said wryly. “Sagittaron will be a mess when they finally put the fighting down.”

“It’s a mess right now.”

“And it’ll be worse before they’re done. I’ll run for the Quorum – something low-level-  and work up from there.”

Herc put his glass down and fixed Stacker with a long, hard look. Then he chuckled. “Lords of sea and stars. Stacker frakkin’ Pentecost, a pencil-pushing gasbagger. All right. Well—” He took up his glass. “—maybe you’ll even straighten ‘em out a bit. Here’s to new directions, and giving those tie-clippers the kick up the arse they deserve.”

Stacker obligingly clinked his glass to Herc’s and drank to the toast.

“Just make sure,” Herc added before drinking himself, “you keep in touch with the old crew. Angie’d string me up by the short and curlies if I let the friendship lapse. You’re the only one she trusts when we play _dolea_.”

“My word on it, Aletheia strike me if I lie."

…

The explosion of the nuclear warhead, violent decompressions, and fire take out Hong Kong’s starboard flight pod. Venting to put them out takes eighty-five of her people.

The Jaegers mop up the rest of the kaiju swarming around the Battlestar. In the aftermath, Herc tallies their losses.

They are now running lower on munitions and souls than they were a day ago, and they haven’t encountered more kaiju.

“Ragnar Anchorage,” Tamsin says thickly. She spreads a paper chart on the command table and taps a black square with a blunt fingernail. Herc pretends not to hear her sniff and swallow. “There’s munitions depot.”

“Royal pain in the arse to anchor a ship there.”

“Book says there are fifty pallets of Class D warheads there,” Tamsin says flatly. “Not to mention all the munitions and small arms we need to come back and ram it down the kaiju’s filthy throats.”

Herc refuses to acknowledge the raw anger in her voice. “If there are, we’ll reassess. Meantime, go verify the intel, Ex.”

Tendo appears beside him shortly after Tamsin returns to confirm Ragnar’s manifest.

“Priority message, Sir,” says Tendo. It’s his hand that warns Herc. Tendo is not – nor has he ever in Herc’s experience been – an emotionally demonstrative person. His eyes as he hands over the print-out are dry. His hands shake.

Herc reads it twice. “Admiral Ngala is dead,” he announces. “Battlestar Atlantea has been destroyed.” The CIC goes quiet. The skies empty as he names the fallen.

Tamsin’s face pinches. “…Who’s the senior officer? Who is in command?”

Herc is, for a moment, in several very different places. He is a young man accepting his pilot wings. He is an older man, entering the apartment he shares with Angela to be presented with the son born whilst he was absent. He is a man older than his years, watching humanity burn in a war that has once again reared up from the depths to consume them.

His wife is gone. His son is dead. The enemy they once vanquished has returned.

But humanity still has one shot.

“Mister Choi,” Herc says levelly, “send a message to all the colonial military units. Use Priority Channel One.” Tamsin’s eyes bore into him across the command table. “Message begins: I am taking command of Fleet.”

…

In the cockpit of Colonial One, Stacker reads the declaration with the mild cynicism of a man resigned to being unaffected except in the most inconvenient of ways by the sweeping changes of the world. Mako watches from his shoulder.

“Commander Hansen has taken control of the Fleet,” Stacker tells her. Her thinning mouth is her only visible reaction. “Inform Commander Hansen,” he says to the co-pilot, “that we are currently involved in rescue operations and require his assistance. Ask for his ETA.”

“He will not respond well to that,” Mako says, as mildly as Stacker.

Stacker raises his eyebrows at her. “He’ll respond as well as I would.”

“Sen—” She swallows the honorific. “Sir, I believe you are on different sides of the issue this time. It will not be like it normally is.”

“Be that as it may…” His insides twist. “Circumstances have changed. Pilot—notify the Commander that this comes directly from the President of the Twelve Colonies, and it is not a request.”

“Yes, Sir!”

Mako’s mouth thins and she glances at the pilot with a line between her brows.

…

Mako is always on the front line. Even when people try to protect her. Especially when people try to protect her.

She got into fights with the children in her village who mocked her family for fastidiousness and low productivity. Her father sent her away to a more sophisticated (more expensive) school which offered more courses to occupy her. In these courses, she learned the Colonial Common Dialect. She also learned that the rich can be cruel, and that often the only honour in a fight is what you bring with you.

She joined the military to avenge her family. Because she was small, the instructors paired her with small opponents; because they were untrained or weaker than larger cadets, those opponents were underestimated. Because they were underestimated, Mako took it upon herself to re-educate their detractors.

She became a fighter pilot to hone herself to the sharpest edge she could hold. Her Sensei finds her a position where she is sheathed—high prestige but little danger. The honour of that position has her as the only military staffer protecting the president of the Twelve Colonies while kaiju methodically erase humanity.

Hong Kong hails them on a closed channel.

Mako cedes the comms to her adoptive father demurely. The butting of these two heads, though rare, is always intractable; the first time their do it as President of the Colonies and Admiral of the Fleet could be explosive. The pilots look back apprehensively as Stacker slips into the co-pilot’s seat and puts on the headset.

Their exchange is terse. Herc orders Stacker to take his people to Ragnar at hyperlight, no stops, no delays, no detours. Stacker refuses to abort the rescue.

Remember that time is heliochoidal. This has all happened before. In a different iteration, it is Stacker ordering Herc back from danger. The DRADIS pings with two kaiju contacts on intercept course with Colonial One.

“We have to leave,” Mako says, putting her hand on the back of Stacker’s chair.

“Continue rescue operations.”

Mako blinks at him. “Sensei. We can’t defend the ship, we only have—”

Stacker’s look silences her. “Mako. We will not abandon these people.”

Long experience and trust ingrained in her very cells shuts her mouth. Tight-lipped, she bows her head and steps back.

Stacker addresses the third conversant. “Herc…”

The Herc of this iteration has the personal knowledge and command experience to know that ordering Stacker Pentecost to do anything has never once yielded its intended result—less the version of him which holds government office. Mako can’t hear what he says in response, but Stacker’s shoulders slump.

“We are committed,” her father says lowly. “We will save as many as we can.”

“Kaiju closing,” reports the pilot.

In the cargo hold of the ship are the antiquated pulse-generators ripped out of Hong Kong. It’s not a good plan. It’s just her only idea. Mako stares hard at the back of her father’s head. “Sensei,” she says, “permission to go below?”

Stacker’s head tips. “Granted.”

Silently, she bows lowly to his back and then leaves. Only once she’s out of sight of civilians does she start running.

. . .

Hong Kong’s alarms sound a moment after Herc hears them distantly through the radio. Tendo confirms what he feels in his gut.

“Sir, two enemy fighters closing on Minister Pentecost’s position!”

“Herc,” says Stacker. He is the only man Herc has ever met who can sound resigned and unbeaten at the same time. In this, he is unique.

Herc doesn’t try to fight him on this. They have come too far and seen too much.

Angela is gone. Chuck is debris. Mako is with Stacker, at the centre of a nuclear crosshairs.

“Gods protect and preserve you,” he intones. The silence on the other end carries a hundred conversations they never got to finish.

“We are committed,” says Stacker. “We will save as many as we can.”

Herc makes himself watch the kaiju draw near and the bloom of nuclear detonation. Only after does he let his head hang.

“Fifty kiloton thermonuclear detonation,” Tendo reports hollowly. “…kaiju moving off, Sir.”

Herc doesn’t feel his voice in his throat, but he hears it. “Continue jump preparation.”

Nobody moves.

Tamsin is the one who orders Tendo to begin the jump count down. Her voice, like Herc’s, is glass and rusted gears.

. . .

Angela lives on Aquaria. Used to live. 

So did Jake Pentecost, but nobody's heard from him for five years so maybe nothing has changed.

**Author's Note:**

> It's drafted most of the way through. I'm going to finish what I've got, then decide if I want to do the Whole Thing or just cut down a narrative.
> 
> I really REALLY hope this is okay...


End file.
